New video game engines announced for Windows Phone 8

Microsoft unveiled a number of video game engines and components amidst Windows Phone 8 announcements the company made today at its BUILD 2012 event. To provide more opportunity for game developers to get started on the platform, the company revealed a total of five new engines, as well as five new components.

What will this mean for consumers? More titles to enjoy, and higher quality titles at that. We've always enjoyed a strong collection of games thanks to Microsoft's Xbox Live that's integrated into Windows Phone, but with competing platforms also scoring games from leading distributors / development studios, Windows Phone has to start offering similar gaming solutions.

If Microsoft is to push the three screens vision, we're to see a strong push on its mobile platform for gamers to move across from the Xbox console and Windows 8. The game engines mentioned in the presentation today were Unity, Cocos2D, Havok, Marmalade, and Ogre. Gaming components included SharpDC, Photon, and Autodesk.

While Microsoft can only ensure tools are present for developers to use, it's up to our developing community to take said tools and craft unique titles for consumers to enjoy. We'd prefer to see such happening instead of either Nokia or Microsoft having to literally bribe developers to port games to Windows Phone.

Where's Unreal? Epic & MS are buddies. They said they make games for Surface, why not WP8 as well. And I dont want Infinity Blade, something entirely new & exclusive. No, not Gears on touch screen, though!

EPIC did port all of Unreal Engine 3 to Windows RT, they showed a demo of it from what I remember. But the WinRT on WP8 is a bit different, they'll need to make tweaks to it I bet but I think we'll see if not the engine itself then games from them for sure.

All talk and no show. Microsoft Studios should've had something impressive and exclusive to show off what WP8 games would be capable of to make sure that the gamers all know that THIS is their next phone OS.